Local Search for Retail- Cavender’s

The Client Story

Cavender’s is a large regional western-wear retailer with 54 physical locations, as well as an Internet Retailer 500-sized web commerce operation. Privately owned, Cavender’s has grown to become the second largest seller of western-wear nationally and are strongly challenging the much larger chain Shepler’s.

Cavender’s worked with Apogee Results and achieved strong success in running profitable SEO and PPC engagements. Our work allowed them to outrank Shepler’s nationally on some incredibly challenging category and industry keywords such as “western wear” despite being outspent more than 5-fold by their larger competitor.

The Challenge

Although Cavender’s core online operations were performing strongly, the individual 50+ retail establishments were not getting visibility within Google Places for keywords other than the Cavender’s brand, therefore missing an opportunity to reach out to the millions of potential customers searching Google for a retail establishment where they could buy products such as “cowboy boots”, “western shirts”, and other similar items without the branded term “Cavenders”.

The Solution

Apogee Results worked with Cavender’s teams, both marketing and retail operations, to reconfigure the Google Places listings for each store, and also worked with the store locator pages on the main Cavender’s web properties. Our work included on-page efforts, link and citation building designed to give the Google search engine the appropriate credibility signals to display Cavender’s more frequently, and also some training materials to help local store operations encourage customer ratings and reviews at the local level, which is an important component of the local search algorithms.

Rapid Results

Cavender’s retail stores, within a very rapid time frame, saw their local listings show up in Google search for a broad range of desired product categories beyond simply the Cavender’s brand. These enhanced listings helped the retail / divisional executives at the company have trust and confidence in the corporate marketing team running the online campaigns, where before there had been a concern that the online group was possibly in competition with, and certainly not in full alignment with, the physical stores.